Deciphering a Lost World

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By Scott Hutchins

Sept. 12, 2014

Published in quick succession this year, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy has kept readers on tenterhooks as they’ve waited for the latest installment of this pure reading pleasure. ­“Annihilation,” “Authority” and “Acceptance” — the titles suggest an especially terrible session of behavioral therapy — introduce Area X, a slice of coast in what appears to be the Florida panhandle. VanderMeer carefully grounds us in that region’s ecology: the palmettos, the black damselflies and the “wealth of birdlife, from warblers and flickers to cormorants and black ibis.” But he also immerses us in its everyday human life: bowling alleys, dive bars, mobile homes. This science fiction happens in our backyard.

As the first two novels open, the mysterious event that created Area X is located several decades in the past. “Annihilation” is the first-person account of a woman known only as “the biologist,” a member of the latest ill-fated expedition to explore Area X. The second book, “Authority,” features Control, the ironically named new director of the Southern Reach, the secretive government agency that organizes these expeditions. The novels are closely related — Control spends much of his time debriefing the biologist — but they are ­essentially different in approach. “Annihilation” is a narrative of exploration, like “Journey Into Mohawk Country,” while “Authority” is a thriller built around conspiracy — more like “The Firm.”

“Acceptance,” the trilogy’s final installment, connects the threads of the first two books, introduces a few of its own and takes us to a satisfying stopping point if not a complete conclusion. Less a stand-alone novel than a series finale, “Acceptance” journeys both forward and backward in time, wrapping up the ­adventures of the first two books and illuminating the beginnings of Area X. Quick chapters alternate among four perspectives: the lighthouse keeper; the former director of the Southern Reach; Control; and the biologist (sort of). They occupy separate timelines in the same geography — the lighthouse keeper before the genesis of Area X; Control and the biologist on their present-day mission in Area X; and the former director bridging past and present with her personal connection to, and obsession with, Area X.

So what is Area X? It is a region of coastline, encased in an invisible, nearly impassable border. A result of military experiments, environmental degradation, aliens or necromancy, Area X is uninhabited by humans. The animal and plant life is lush but strange. The dolphins and owls appear not just to see you, but to recognize you. The thistles may listen. Random plant samples are revealed to be created out of human cells. Most interesting, Area X is absolutely pure. Heavy ­metals and other pollutants are gone. Water and air are pristine. It’s a perfect wilderness, deeply hostile to human life. Area X operates with intelligence, compiling new living creatures, genetically twinning people, infecting and overwhelming rational minds (reminiscent of the Cordyceps fungus that zombifies ants). But what is the nature of this intelligence? Is it a decentralized system, like a beehive or Darwinian ­evolution, or is it a centralized consciousness? Or — a third option — is it a decentralized consciousness, extending into every blade of grass, all places at once, like God?

These questions aren’t idle philosophizing; the answers will determine the ­characters’ survival. And Area X is no abstract field of ideas, but a place as palpable as the stretch of Gulf Coast it is evidently based on. Here’s the former director passing through the only known entry point: “The molasses feeling . . . comes next, the sense of wading through thigh-high water, the resistance that means you are close to the end.” Similar precision grounds the reader while descending into a living “tunnel” (“The stairs form a curling snarl of crooked teeth”) or encountering the strange texture of an impossible beast (“like ice when it has frozen from flowing water into fingerlike polyps”).

In fact, the real accomplishment of these books lies less in their well-designed plots than in VanderMeer’s incredibly evocative, naturalist eye. Both “Annihilation” and “Acceptance” feel like gripping page-turners as written by Loren Eiseley:

“The pewter stillness of the channel of water in the foreground reflected the lines of the flames and the billowing of the smoke — reflected the nearest reeds, too, and doubled by reflection also the island that at its highest point showcased island oaks and palmetto trees, their trunks white lines lost in patches of fog.”

I picked that passage more or less at random from “Acceptance.” The book is full of them; indeed, it’s built from them. At its best, VanderMeer’s language is precise, metaphorical but rigorous, and as fertile as good loam. More than mere atmosphere, the rich natural details are the trilogy’s most powerful technique — and, in some ways, its point. Just as the DMZ separating the Koreas has become a sanctuary for migratory birds, so VanderMeer makes us consider for whom exactly this pristine dystopia is dystopic. Hint: It’s not the foxes, owls or starfish.

No wonder the most involving character here is the biologist (a specialist in ­ecosystems, no less), and no wonder Control, with his lack of appreciation for the natural world, is a little drab. In his chapters, “Acceptance” experiences its only slight tonal slips, as if the character’s inability to absorb Area X affects his place in the narrative. The sections from the points of view of the biologist, the lighthouse keeper and the former director, on the other hand, are so thoroughly imagined they sometimes bent this reader’s experience with reality.

VanderMeer places these novels not in some dark future but in a recognizable present. This strategy has costs and ­benefits. The reader periodically sticks a finger in the pages (especially in the second book, “Authority”) struggling to reconcile the Southern Reach and Area X with greater Tallahassee. However, this collision of the real and the imagined opens up the novels’ more prickly political conversations. In the world of the trilogy, people are basically free to move about and say what they want, but are also under constant surveillance, the authorities able to swoop in at any moment. Sound familiar? And what about the extreme environmental degradation that may have caused Area X? Look at BP in the Gulf and BPAs in the drinking supply and what appears to be a human-generated great extinction. Suddenly, you wonder if the resistance in your reading is related to the books or to the wishful thinking that gets you through the day.

By the end of “Acceptance,” our understanding of Area X has deepened but not fully resolved. I appreciate VanderMeer’s avoiding that graceless if honorable tradition (dating back at least to H. G. Wells) in which a character ties everything up in a bow, normally in stilted monologue. Still, I could have used a little more illumination. Though the novels are all deeply satisfying, our business with Area X feels unfinished.

And so it may be. With Area X, VanderMeer has created an immersive and wonderfully realized world; I wouldn’t be surprised if he revisits it. If so, I’ll happily sign up for the next expedition.